THEOLOGY FROM A FRACTURED VISTA: SUSAN NEIMAN'S EVIL IN MODERN THOUGHT

Evil in Modern Thought, Susan Neiman's account of the intellectual trajectory of modernity, employs the trope “homeless” to articulate deep difficulties that affirmations of divine transcendence and of human capacities to acknowledge transcendence face in a contemporary context thoroughly marked by fragmentation, fragility, and contingency. The “hospitality” of the Incarnation, which makes a fractured world a place for divine welcoming of the human in all its contingency and brokenness, is proposed as locus for theological engagement with Neiman's appropriation of a Kantian sense of hope as the readiness to resist evil in a world seemingly bereft of welcome.     

A META-ANALYSIS OF WORK SAMPLE TEST VALIDITY: UPDATING AND INTEGRATING SOME CLASSIC LITERATURE

Work sample tests have been used in applied psychology for decades as important predictors of job performance, and they have been suggested to be among the most valid predictors of job performance. As we examined classic work sample literature, we found the narrative review by Asher and Sciarrino (1974) to be plagued by many methodological problems. Further, it is possible that data used in this study may have influenced the results (e.g., r = .54) reported by Hunter and Hunter in their seminal work in 1984. After integrating all of the relevant data, we found an observed mean correlation between work sample tests and measures of job performance of .26. This value increased to .33 when measures of job performance (e.g., supervisory ratings) were corrected for attenuation. Our results suggest that the level of the validity for work sample tests may not be as large as previously thought (i.e., approximately one third less than previously thought). Further, our work also summarizes the relationship of work sample exams to measures of general cognitive ability. We found that work sample tests were associated with an observed correlation of .32 with tests of general cognitive ability.     

Kantian Morals and Humean Motives

The idea that moral imperatives are categorical is commonly used to support internalist claims about moral judgment. I argue that the categorical quality of moral requirements shows at most that moral motivation need not flow from a background desire to be moral. It does not show that moral judgments can motivate by themselves, or that amoralism is impossible.     

PHILOSOPHY,MYTH, AND THE “SIGNIFICANCE” OF SPECULATIVE THOUGHT

Abstract: A close examination of the relation between philosophy and myth reveals important functional parallels in some of their basic means of operation that helps shed some light on philosophy's overall task. A crucial aspect of the structural similarity between philosophy and myth is the generation of what Hans Blumenberg calls “significance.” I argue that the preservation and enhancement of significance (through a strong affinity to myth) is an essential and overlooked aspect of philosophy's task, one best accomplished through the world‐orienting work of speculative philosophy. By weaving the fragmented insights, criticisms, lessons, and methods of the more “specialized” analytic, pragmatic, critical, postmodern, deconstructivist, and other methods of thought together in a systematic way, speculative philosophy may be able to provide us with the kind of world orientation needed for developing a healthier, richer, more profound understanding of ourselves and our proper place within the world.     

Calvin's Metaphysics of Our Union with Christ

This study of the Calvin corpus asks whether the older works of Emmen, Dominicé and Kolfhaus and English monographs adequately answer the question of how human beings can receive life‐giving properties from the person of Christ without recognizing Calvin's use of the conceptual tool of reduplicative predication to explain our unio spiritualis cum Christo. Thanks to a renaissance in the use of conceptual analysis in the service of theology, we identify Calvin's use of this conceptual tool and propose a tentative solution to the vexing question of how he predicates a unio spiritualis between humans and the person of the Mediator, since he states that the unio is, in the first instance, between our self‐subsistent natura humana and Christ's anhypostatic natura humana. How then can this unio‘channel’ life‐giving properties to us? Calvin himself states the rule that ‘the flesh of Christ does not of itself have a power so great as to quicken us’; that is, only a supposit, not a nature, can perform such operations. Calvin relieves this predicative tension by employing the conceptual tool of reduplicative predication – the borrowing and ‘channeling’ of properties across the hypostatic union of Christ as well as across the unio spiritualis– such that Homo secundum istum unionem est iustus.